Transportation Modeler

A Transportation Network Modeling (What-If analysis application)

Designed at Manhattan Associates (2013)

This application focuses on tactical and strategic level decision making for transportation and supply chain problems. It enables the user to setup artificial supply chain environments in the detail level desired. User can setup a multi-echelon network starting from stores all the way up to manufacturing plants, or can create a study for a partial single DC delivery network.

Project Details

Research

Current Market Needs

Supply chain execution is a very complex and data intensive process leaving very little scope to optimize existing networks. The ability to create pseudo supply chain networks and tweak data to analyze results is perceived as a safe playground. Users can create a replica of the entire existing network or can focus on part of the supply chain to simulate various scenarios and/or optimize them. The ability to study cause and effect of a few decision points in the network is of immense value to users as it allows them to study various scenarios and simulations without disturbing live data.

My Role

UX/UI, Interactive Prototyping

This was my very first project assignment after joining Manhattan Associates. When I started working with the team, I quickly realized that if I do not focus on ramping up on domain knowledge and apply my design skills to this project, I would get lost in the ocean of data presented to me in the form of excel documents. Deconstructing available information and breaking it into smaller chunks is where I began chiseling at this mammoth of a task. I delivered an interactive prototype that immensely helped the BA, Development and Science teams involved in this project to understand UX team's vision for this application. This was coupled with behavioral design and UI design documentation.

Thinking Through

— Ability to hide panels and collapse extra information helps declutter working area
— Visual hierarchy mapped to component hierarchy of Study > Scenario > Simulation
— Data visualization and map interactions make information more usable
— Making components feature rich by providing different modes by which data can be viewed

Project Highlight

I enjoyed the design challenge that a highly complex data engine provided. From excel sheets to an interactive user interface, this application went through a massive transformation and I was fortunate to be driving the UX/UI direction on this project. Data visualization was driven by business goals and objectives so as to offer maximum value of simulating and optimizing networks. I gained a great deal of domain knowledge working on this project!

Design Documentation

Following are snippets of design documentation I produced to communicate within and across teams.